UNIDATA - A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY SHARING RESOURCES VIA TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

In initiating the Unidata Program, scientists hoped to meet common nee ds for accessing and using atmospheric data in education and research using state-of-the-art technology. As communications technologies have advanced, Unidata has increasingly become a ''virtual community'' in which participants cooperate, collaborate, and share a variety of reso urces, including data. The Unidata experience-how it resembles and dif fers from other concepts of location-independent collaborations-may se rve as a model for building and supporting communities of researchers and educators with common needs for data and the tools to use them.